An Ice Person / Literature

The Snow Queen is the very embodiment of winter.

Image by snuapril01. Used with permission.

---

• The Age Of Ice: Alexander Velitzyn was conceived on a bed of ice, is immune to cold, and, when in a state of high emotion, his flesh becomes painfully cold to the touch. In time he learns to control this, being able to make ordinary ice diamond hard and to turn water to ice at will. Extreme, as in Arctic level, cold puts him into a state of suspended animation. After doing this once he stops aging, his story extending over 250 years. It is hinted that he may be an incarnation of Old Man Frost.
• Amoridere's "Ice Queen" in the poems A momentary thaw, Antifreeze, Burned, and Dying Flames is a different example than most. From what's implied, she can generate fire (or warmth), like she does with ice, however, she seems to have some Power Incontinence, as she can't control how often she freezes, nor can she can keep herself from being burned by her own flames.
• The ruling family of the Ice Kingdom in The Big Sister and Little Sister. After making a pact with the Mountain Spirit, they have become a sort of ice elementals. They can also turn people and animals into ice.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: The demigods have different powers depending on who their divine parent is. The children of the sea god Poseidon and the wind god Boreas can occasionally master ice. The children of Hades can do it too, but they are much weaker in this regard.
• Castle Hangnail: The evil sorceress Eudaimonia has a magic wand that gives her ice powers, appropriately for someone so cold-hearted.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Jadis the White Witch causes Endless Winter for a hundred years and lives in an ice castle. She has other powers, however, most notably turning dissidents to stone.
• Codex Alera: Firecrafters can do this by using their furies to remove heat from something instead of adding it. We first see this demonstrated by Kalarus Brencis Minoris, who thinks it's funny to push the obvious bully-target into a fountain and freeze the water around him.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Kallias, the High Lord of the Winter Court, has powerful ice magic.
• Juniper Taylor in The Descendants. Not just water ice, either. She's frozen air at least once.
• Deviant has the appropriately named Blizzard, known for freezing people solid. This isn't the limit of her powers, though, as she can also summon snow, frost, and ice, and pretty much control it any way she desires. She's also unaffected by temperature change.
• Discworld:
  • Thief of Time: Kaos, the fifth horseman who left before they became famous, has a sword that's so cold it goes beyond absolute zero and generates a sort of "burning cold" anti-heat. He uses it to keep milk fresh by putting it in the same room as a super-hot burning furnace.
  • Wintersmith: The Wintersmith has ice-based magical powers as a subset of being the Anthropomorphic Personification of winter.
• The Divine Comedy: The Devil is the originator of the blizzards which freeze the final circle of Hell. Thanks to the winds from his six wings, thousands upon thousands of traitors are frozen with him in Lake Cocytus, forever to hate each other for eternity.
• In Dreams of the Golden Age, Teia has freezing-based superpowers.
• Queen Mab of the Winter Court of Faerie in The Dresden Files has near absolute control over ice and, in one instance, froze the water in Harry Dresden's eyeballs to prove a point (namely, that he should shut up).
  • Harry also figured out that he can adjust his fire spells to draw heat less evenly from the surroundings and, a couple of times, uses this to freeze water.
  • After he took Mab's offer of becoming the Winter Knight, Harry has been able to use ice-related spells much more. It was hinted that his new mastery of ice and his old mastery of fire are significant somehow.
• The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship: One of the Fool's companions is a farmer who bears a bundle of straw that makes things colder when burned.
• Forbidden Sea: This is one of the powers of Araedyn, the younger Sea Prince. In Shadow in the Sea, he impresses Sadelyn by cupping water in his hand and freezing it into an ice sculpture of a starfish.
• The villain of Caroline Cooney's Freeze Tag combines this oddly with Taken for Granite — her basic schtick is that if she touches you, she renders you frozen and immobile, apparently forever, while fully conscious and aware. She never actually kills any of her victims and, at several points, undoes the effect just to toy with them. (This leads to part of the conflict over whether or not to kill her — if she can't be redeemed, a lot of people will stay frozen.)
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter", the titular character wears nothing but a veil of gossamer on a snowfield, can run over snow without leaving tracks, and, when Conan catches her, is as cold as ice.
  • Her dad, Ymir, who doesn't actually appear but rescues her and freezes Conan almost to death in the process.
• As a Yuki-onna, Rin from Grimm Tales is literally one of these. Her mastery of ice and snow is so great she can even make ice duplicates of her opponents to fight for her.
  • Jason Stark use ice magic in combat, and demonstrates great versatility and control of the size and shape of the ice he creates, creating everything from giant frozen walls to weapons made of ice.
• How The Six Made Their Way In The World: One of the soldier's five companions is a man who brings frost unless he wears his hat crooked over one ear. This ability comes in handy when a greedy king tries to kill all the companions by luring them into a room with a heated iron floor.
• The Haruki Murakami short story Ice Man...a woman falls in love with a guy who has "white patches of snow" in his hair and a look "piercing like an icicle" and it doesn't end too well.
• InCryptid: James Smith is a sorcerer with natural ice abilities, just like Antimony has natural fire abilities.
• The Jaz Parks series has Vayl, a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire of a particular type called a Wraith, who have the power to produce cold temperatures. He later gains the ability to form superhard ice armor, in the manner of Iceman.
• In Lorien Legacies, Marina/Number Seven develops this power immediately after Five kills Eight, who she'd clearly been in love with. Eventually John/Four gets it too, but only because his legacy lets him use any legacy he's observed/experienced.
• The drakulles from the German SF series Maddrax can blow out clouds of ice that cause their opponents to freeze.
• In The Magicians, though we don't really see her use it, Janet mentions her discipline is a specialized form of cold magic.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • The Jaghut have powers connected to ice, cold and death — possibly also giving them a limited control of time. They have their own Warren (Path of Magic) called Omtose Phellack, also known as the Hold of Ice, and are fond of calling down ice ages. Elder God Mael calls ice 'the Jaghut answer to everything'.
  • The Stormriders combine this with Ice Magic Is Water. They are a mysterious people living in a deep ocean trench, only appearing during storms, sheathed in ice armour and riding hybrid-mounts made of water and ice. They may be connected to the Jaghut.
• The titular character from Mercedes Lackey's Snow Queen, especially the second one, has this ability, as does the Icehart.
• In the Merry Gentry series, the character Frost is the sidhe embodiment of winter, and Jack Frost.
• The Groke ("Mårran" in the original) in The Moomins stories is a hag-like being who is ice cold. She freezes the ground she walks on and kills the plants with frost; if she stays too long, nothing ever grows there again. She cannot create ice directly, but once, when she need to take a sea trip, she wades out on the beach and lets the water freeze into an icefloe, giving her a makeshift boat. The one time we get to see things from her perspective, we learn she longs for heat, light, and company and is not cold or dark by choice.
• The Clayr of the Old Kingdom trilogy, though primarily a clan of all female clairvoyants, use ice to amplify their Sight, hence why they live in a Glacier. When away from the glacier, they use spells to create a screen of ice on which they project their Sight, so as to show others.
• Ilke in Phenomena, she was given some of the spirit of a Frost spirit and can use most powers related to frost, like ice and snow.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, Jack Frost, the goblins, and some of the fairies all have ice magic.
• In The Singer of All Songs, there are several kinds of chantments (magic songs). The Daughters of Taris, an all-female religious order, can sing the chantments of ice, and they protect their territory with a giant ice wall. Instead of combining with water (indeed, it's noted that the ability to swim isn't particularly common among them), the High Priestess also bears and passes on the knowledge of the chantments of ice that invoke darkness, the opposite of the chantments of fire which also have power over light.
• "The Snow Queen." She seems to be a member of The Fair Folk, with similarly inscrutable motives; she rules a race of creatures who resemble snowflakes, and lives far north of our heroine.
• The Others from A Song of Ice and Fire are the ice. They're associated with the perpetually frozen far north, appear with the worst weather winter can bring — unless the winter follows them — and even seem to be made of ice, melting when they die, and come equipped with armour and weaponry made of magically altered ice. They embody the Evil Is Deathly Cold aspect of this trope, seeking to plunge the world into an endless winter and killing every living human they come across, reanimating them as mindless Wights under their command. They are also associated with "giant ice spiders" in legends. Whatever those are.
  • In the short novel, The Ice Dragon, which provided some inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, the main character, Adara, is a young girl who was born during the coldest winter in living memory, and somehow winter had left its mark upon her. Many readers have noted that she bears a resemblance to the Others. Though she does not have any active powers, she has a strong affinity for the cold and can stay outside during winter without it even bothering her. Her skin is also pale and cold to the touch, on top of having a fittingly icy personality brought about by her unusual condition. On top of all this, she is capable of riding the titular ice dragon, which has plenty of icy powers of its own.
• The first spell Grumph casts in Spells, Swords, & Stealth is an ice spell, used to assist Thistle in their first real fight as adventurers. In the second book, Grumph puts the ice spell to creative use during his mage trial by casting it on himself when he has to cross an obstacle hot enough to knock him out if he went unprotected.
• Super Powereds has Michael Clark, who can throw blue bolts that freeze anything they hit. He throws them by punching towards the target. He can also form an armor of ice to protect himself, regenerating it as it melts or takes damage. He's a bit of a bully and has a hard time coping with the fact that he's no longer the strongest of his peers (as he was in his hometown). Ever since his first match with Vince, he holds a deep grudge towards him despite the fact that he won that fight. Michael convinces himself that Vince humiliated him by not charging up before the fight and nearly beat him with what Michael considers a sucker punch. By Year 2 he is still under the mistaken assumption that he's better than Vince when, in fact, Vince has left him far behind and doesn't even consider beating Michael to be a challenge. It helps that while Michael's ice armor may provide some resistance against Vince's fire blasts, it does nothing to hinder an electrical blast and Michael didn't know that Vince could absorb and emit other kinds of energy.
• Blizzard in Tales of an Mazing Girl can create ice with his gun. He is of course named after the video Game company, Activision/Blizzard.
• Trapped on Draconica: Zarracka can do this with her Breath Weapon.
  • Legacy of the Dragokin: So can her nephew, Benji.
• Trinton Chronicles:
  • Frost is one of these - he creates and controls ice and cold into every useful tool he can. It also helps that he is immune to cold with the draw back that his powerful icy-aura can't be turned off, only down, makes dating and cuddling rather interesting.
  • As a sub-trope, technically, the Fairy Sisters have a touch of this too, as they control the Ice Maze in the first story arc.
• Twilight Dragon has Princess Atoli, who is specifically known as the Sorceress of Snow.
• The winter court in the Wicked Lovely series. Specifically, Beira the winter queen and Donia the winter girl. Donia later becomes the next winter queen after Beira's death. Her icy nature is caused by bitterness about being forced to become the winter girl, and thus not being able to be with her love, Keenan, the summer king — their very natures are incompatible, although it is implied that, after Beira's death, they at least try. I would imagine it would be painful; Keenan would end up covered in frostbite and Donia in burns.
• Icewing drgons in Wings of Fire are well-suited for living in cold environments. This includes the ability to breathe a deadly freezing breath.
• The Wizard of London: After her pact with the Ice Dragon, Lady Cordelia is basically a mage version of this. David is well on his way to becoming one as well.
• Whateley Universe:
  • Characters like Icer, Winter, Bifrost, Nahga, and Frostbite.
  • And inventor Mister Cool, who doesn't have the power, but invented the equivalent of a freeze ray.
• In Renegades, Frostbite can create and manipulate ice.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: A rookie witch named Megumi who attends an evil Wizarding School learns some ice spells to help her in fights with other students. They aren't her primary attack, but she proves competent enough to use them effectively in challenging fights.
• In The Witchlands, Icewitches are a subset of Water witches who can freeze things.
• "Wizard Bait": Ice Witch Besberdin is, well, a witch made of ice with the powers of "Ice Hell", having arrive to retrieve the Sword of Winters from Thusalah's horde.
• Worm has Rime, a female superhero from Los Angeles. Her power consists of generating little balls of ice which expand into iceberg-sized ice formations on contact with solid objects.

---